Talk:Diamond Jim Brady

Solid source

Here's a good web article from The New York Times for expanding the page.[1] Trevor GH5 (talk) 23:00, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

I've included material from the article, related to his eating habits, thank you. Leptus Froggi (talk) 22:26, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

Since the NY Times article might disappear and cause confusion in this article, here's a salient quote from it:

"It must also be said that Morell has a rather florid and hyperbolic writing style that comes especially to the fore when he gets to the eating parts. While he ably chronicles Brady’s extraordinary journey from rough-hewn poverty to extreme wealth — born to a struggling Irish-American family in Manhattan’s Lower West Side docklands in 1856, Brady parlayed his charisma into a lucrative career selling railroad equipment to the big lines — Morell can’t resist an opportunity to embellish a food scene. And so, it’s not enough to say that Brady and his companion, the actress Lillian Russell, loaded up on corn at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair; no, they “ate their way through a goodly part of the Kansas corn crop.”

Furthermore, Morell’s chief eyewitness to Brady’s eating habits was another congenital embellisher, George Rector. The son of the restaurateur Charles Rector, who, in 1899, opened an opulent “lobster palace” in Midtown Manhattan bearing his name, George Rector was a fixture of New York’s pre-Prohibition dining scene — and later a prominent food columnist and author.

It was Rector who propagated the sole Marguery story so treasured by M. F. K. Fisher. In his telling in Morell’s book, Rector first heard of the dish — in which sole fillets are poached in fish stock, garnished with shellfish and served under a rich buttery sauce — after Brady had returned from a trip to Paris. Diamond Jim “spoke of this dish so feelingly to my father that I was immediately taken out of Cornell University, where I was in the third year of law school, and sent to Paris to get the recipe for the fish sauce,” Rector recalled.

O.K., hold it right there. I checked with Cornell University. Neither its development office nor its registrar has any record of a George Rector ever having been enrolled at its law school."

Leptus Froggi (talk) 22:37, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

Years Active

Listed as 61. He lived to 60 and probably wasn't active at birth.

Plagiarism

Removed a bunch of text pasted in from the Gourmandizer article. Ethan Mitchell (talk) 12:18, 29 July 2012 (UTC)

Good call. It doesn't seem likely that it's completely true. And even if it was in some part ... how encyclopedic is it how much someone eats for breakfast?? Leptus Froggi (talk) 22:46, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Years active needs to be corrected

The article states that the subject died at age 60 but under “Years active” it states “61.” Perhaps among his many other feats, he had been an extraordinarily precocious fetus? Should we change it to perhaps 39 as the article states he became chief assistant to the head of a railroad at age 21, the field he is probably best remembered for?HistoryBuff14 (talk) 21:39, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

How did Brady acquire his wealth?

I don't find in the article how he got his money. (Being assistant manager of a railroad doesn't by itself seem a path to riches.)

I hope someone knowledgeable on the subject will fill in this omission.2600:1700:E1C0:F340:F4D1:5C90:2FE9:5730 (talk) 20:44, 13 May 2019 (UTC)

Notability

My reverted section was not meant in bad faith. Who is this and how does he meet the WP notability guidelines? 216.164.249.213 (talk) 11:30, 11 April 2023 (UTC)